Noteflight is a web application and vibrant online community that supports the creation, sharing and playback of scores using conventional Western music notation, all taking place within a standard web browser. The site has been live for 6 years and has over 1.2 million registered users today. Of necessity, Noteflight was launched using the Adobe Flash platform, but in the last several years it has successfully transitioned to a pure Web standards environment including SVG and Web Audio.

Prior to Noteflight, interactive notation editing was only available via a small number of native desktop applications. This state of affairs kept composers, arrangers and musicians from participating in the revolution in communication that has so changed human affairs in recent decades. Today, Noteflight provides a planetary-scale community for musical creation, consumption and education that is both free and standards-based.

The most musically significant and innovative features of Noteflight include the notation editor and its built-in sequencer, synthesizer and mixer that use downloadable instrument samples. This talk will discuss significant implementation challenges for these components, and look at how they differ from analogous components in the native-app arena. Particular attention will be given to how being a networked, community-based application affected many design goals. Along the way, the talk will also shed light on the challenges facing Noteflight’s transition from a proprietary platform (Flash) to a pure web-standards platform.

Noteflight: A Web-standards-based Compositional Community